Not long after I started making these videos about illustration it began to
dawn on me just how many significant talented illustrators there have been
who simply don't get the credit they deserve or who most people have never
heard of and yet many of them were extremely successful and influential in
their lifetimes. So in the hope of putting that right for
some at least this is the first of a series featuring these unsung heroes
from illustration's back catalogue. All the illustrators featured here are from
what is called the Golden Age of Illustration. That's roughly between the
1890s when offset lithography enabled illustrators to work in full colour and
the 1930s when colour photography started putting illustrators out of work.
First into the spotlight is cartoonist Eugene Zimmerman known professionally
as Zim and in the spirit of full disclosure let me admit that despite a
lifetime's love of cartoon illustration I had never even heard of him until a
few weeks ago while looking online for somebody else entirely and it was this
revelation that triggered me to make the series.
Zimmerman emigrated from Switzerland to the United States in 1868 at the age of
six. At 18 he got a job as a sign writer and spent all his spare time building a
portfolio of cartoons in the hope of turning professional. And within a couple
of years his determination paid off when he was hired by Puck, a popular satirical
magazine of the day. At Puck Zimmerman created a large volume of comic
political and social commentary and was kept busy freelancing for other clients
at the same time. In 1885 he was lured away to the rival Judge magazine where
he was given greater freedom and more money. Although he was among the first
illustrators to be able to take advantage of the new full-colour process
like many of the period Zimmerman's work was founded on his
abilities within the longer standing tradition of black and white linear
expression. And there weren't many others whose line work was as energetic
descriptive and downright enjoyable as his. It was what defined his entire style
and even when working in colour the use of washes of transparent ink allowed the
line work to solidify and bring his characters to life. And that was really
his greatest attribute. Zimmerman's ability to playfully satirize his fellow
humans whatever their race gender age or station in life and their exaggerated
anatomy expressions and posing made them all the more familiar to his audience.
He left Judge in 1912 and went on to write and publish his own correspondence
course for aspiring cartoonists. Sadly it's no longer in print but you can buy
it as an e-book if you look for it online. At the age of 23
Harry Rountree arrived in London from New Zealand determined to make his mark
as an illustrator. For two years he struggled and sold only
the occasional drawing but when Little Folks children's publishing gave him a
commission to illustrate comical animals he produced a series of images so
endearing and believable others quickly started to offer him commissions. And by
the early 1900s he was busy illustrating books for Little Folks,
writing and illustrating his own stories and in demand by nearly every publishing
house in London. Like Zimmerman Rountree had grown up in an age of linear
illustration and was of similarly astonishing ability with a pen.
His line work was tightly controlled and could successfully evoke lighting
conditions and texture seemingly with ease but unlike Zimmerman most of
Rountree's colour illustrations were fully fledged watercolour paintings and
did not rely on line work for support. They were built up in a series of washes
from the loosest of tonal beginnings to the highly resolved and vivid final piece.
But when the job demanded it he also created more graphic flat colour work
and he used his skills in both color and monochrome to evoke animal characters of
astonishing plausibility whatever liberties he took with them. Wearing
clothes for example or holding something they were not equipped to do. They
appeared true to their actual anatomy in a way similar to and I would argue
superior to that of Rountree's contemporary Beatrix Potter.
He also produced many cartoons for Punch magazine, found time for the occasional
piece of advertising work and numerous book illustrations for fiction writers
including Arthur Conan Doyle. But it's no surprise that he had the
greatest success with his illustrations of classics of children's literature
including the Brer Rabbit stories, a playful retelling of Aesop's fables and
a largely forgotten but visually remarkable interpretation of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland. This consisted of mostly black and white spot
illustrations interspersed with occasional dazzling full colour paintings
all of which demonstrated Rountree's prodigious levels of skill and
imagination, which makes it all the sadder and puzzling that success did not
follow him into later life and Roundtree died in relative poverty and obscurity in
1950
When he's remembered at all Hungarian-born Willy Pogany is best
remembered for his meticulously detailed pen and ink drawings of myths and fables
such as the illustrations he created for Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
in 1910. And this success was closely followed by the Wagnerian epic poems
Tannhauser, Parsifal and Lohengrin in subsequent years. All these were created
while Pogany was living in London but in 1914 he moved to America and in the
States his reputation and success blossomed considerably when his work was
featured on the covers of many popular magazines. And he also found himself
bombarded with offers of lucrative work in the increasingly pervasive world of
advertising. Despite his early reputation as a
classic pen-and-ink man Pogany was actually more stylistically diverse than
most in his approaches to illustration. As well as the obsessively detailed and
finely shaded ink drawings there were many others which were intentionally far
simpler and stylized with a clean linear grace reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley.
And it was a similar story with his colour work. Most of the time he would
produce remarkably intricate atmospheric painting both with and without visible
line work but later in his career he also adopted a flatter less anatomically
correct style more in keeping with the Art Deco movement than his Art Nouveau roots.
Like Rountree Pogany published a version of Alice in Wonderland in
monochrome and colour but his adopted a particularly modernist look especially
in the line work. Willy Pogany really was the ultimate
creative Renaissance man. Besides illustration for everything from
poems to posters and press ads he worked as a painter sculptor and stage designer
and if that wasn't enough he also worked in Hollywood as an art director on
several musicals during the nineteen thirties and forties. You have to wonder
how such a prodigious and wide-ranging talent is now so far from being a
household name.
And last but nobody's idea of least is Arthur Szyk. He was a
Polish illustrator who completely rejected the concept of modernism and
instead emulated the techniques and mindset of medieval and renaissance
painting, particularly illuminated manuscripts. His early work produced in
Poland was mostly political in nature and only occasionally hinted at the
remarkable illustrations which were to come. In 1921 syczyk moved to Paris and
in 1925 he published the first of his major Illustrated works. This was the
book of Esther from the Jewish Bible. This lavish full-colour book was a series
of exquisitely detailed narrative images complete with complex border art.
The style he established in this book and others from this period was quite
formal and mannered similar to early Renaissance artists and like them it was
the meticulous and painstaking application of colour which commanded the
viewer's attention. Unusually Szyk worked on top of his precise drawings in
both watercolour and gouache, producing a particularly effective balance of
transparent and opaque colour. While in Paris Szyk also created a series of
illustrations depicting the events of the American Revolutionary War as a
tribute to George Washington and the USA in general. In 1934 he also began working
on what was to be his most ambitious and time-consuming project - 48 narrative
illustrations for the Haggadah the Jewish account of the exodus from Egypt.
But at the same time his work became more politically engaged as Hitler rose
to power in Germany. As a Jew and a Pole Szyk was predictably not the Nazis'
biggest fan and he started applying his talents to a series of remarkably
intricate and vitriolic satires of Hitler and his allies.
Szyk had moved to london in 1937 and it was there that the Haggadah was
finally published in 1940. According to the Times they pronounced it to be 'among
the most beautiful books that the hand of man has ever produced'. It was also the
most expensive, with each of 250 limited edition copies selling for £6000
each in today's money. And in the same year he moved to America where his work
in general and political caricatures in particular found a far bigger audience
through high-profile magazines such as Colliers. And even while producing these
satirical attacks on the bad guys he was simultaneously working on several
non-political volumes including the poems of Omar Khayyam and a typically
extravagant and absorbing Illustrated collection of fairy tales by Hans
Christian Andersen. The character work and scenic illustrations he produced
for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were published just as the war ended and once
the bad guys had finally been defeated Szyk used his talents and influence
to help establish Israel in Palestine before he died in 1951. While rummaging
around the internet researching for this video I was pleasantly surprised to
discover there's an Arthur Szyk society dedicated to keeping his memory
alive. And there are some websites and blogs featuring these and other unsung
heroes so if you're interested in illustration and want to find out more
about any of them I urge you to get googling.
You never know who you might come across